It is well known that tools for automated testing of hardware and software applications, especially telephony based systems, are not widely available. Those tools that are available are specially designed for a particular application or applications, such as the testing of voice mail systems. Such tools are not readily adaptable for testing applications other than those for which they have been specifically designed.
Thus, new automated test systems must be designed and built each time new hardware and/or software applications are developed. This is a time consuming and expensive task. As a result, test systems are not developed for every hardware and/or software application. Many such applications therefore suffer from inadequate testing prior to release.
A need therefore exists for an improved automated testing tool that is readily adaptable for testing a plurality of hardware and/or software applications. Like prior art automated testing tools, such an improved testing system and method would drive a system under test adequately to verify that the system is error free operationally and robust from a load handling perspective. Errors in the system under test, including the device the error occurred on, the instruction that failed, and the actual error number, would be accurately reported. In addition, peg counts and timing would be gathered and reported.
In addition, however, such an improved system and method for testing hardware and/or software applications would take into consideration at every turn that the present projects under test may not reflect future projects due to constant and rapid technological changes. Such a system and method would therefore provide a very modular format so that they may be easily modified to meet the needs of future systems.
More particularly, such a system and method would provide for additional interface libraries (or layers thereof) to be added as new projects requiring testing were developed. Additionally, none of the infrastructure code or system control code would need to be modified in such cases. In that fashion, such a system and method would be capable of working in conjunction with existing test systems.